Enlighten 4: pushing the boundaries of immersion with the next generation of illumination technology
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Wednesday 16th February 2022
With the arrival of high definition, lighting took on a new level of significance in gaming. As 4K gaming truly kicks into gear across consoles, PC and mobile devices, good lighting has never been more critical.
Enlighten, the real-time global illumination technology from Silicon Studio, has been at the forefront of lighting technology in games for many years. Will Joseph is technical lead for the Enlighten project, and the team has been hard at work on its next major update: Enlighten 4.
In this article, Joseph takes us through some of the major features of Enlighten 4. He describes how the technology can help developers, large and small, to create cutting-edge visuals, just like Hellblade developer Ninja Theory has done, and he shares what Silicon Studio's plans are for 2022.
Enlighten 4 and its new features
As exciting as the leap to the next generation has been, what's not exciting is the increased workload that new technology tends to demand. Joseph explains that Silicon Studio has implemented features in Enlighten that are intended to ease these pressures on programmers and artists.
"We have overhauled the entire 3D lightmap pipeline to support extensive use throughout game worlds of any size"
With Enlighten 4, the core technology has been improved to closely simulate, in real-time, the interaction of light within complex nature environments, such as a dense jungle world.
"This is made possible by next-gen 3D lightmap technology, which is an enlightened variation on the classic 2D lightmap data structure first used in Quake," explains Joseph.
"With 3D lightmaps, game developers no longer have to deal with the often painful limitations of lightmap UV unwraps required with
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